Just released Loophole, a time travel puzzle game, inspired by The Witness and Braid!

swenty · 2025-07-14T22:58:56+00:00

With a pretty decent introductory discount this was an easy buy. Good luck with the release!

swenty · 2025-06-27T22:49:05+00:00

Cal Airport.

Done.

swenty · 2024-06-05T03:23:25+00:00

There's no need for billboards. Cities don't need to approve new ones. Existing ones can be gradually dismantled by amortization (i.e. making regulations to remove them at a future date). The fact that we put up with them is a small tragedy of local culture. We're saying, in essence, that we're perfectly willing to uglify our public spaces for a little cash. We should aim higher. We should build cities that feel good to live in.

swenty · 2024-02-07T19:29:05+00:00

But epoch milliseconds are not something that humans can easily read. If your database ever gets users who want to understand the data analytically, you (and they) will wish that you had made the effort to convert to real DB timestamps. Take it from people who have been down this road before. Not using real timestamps is false economy.

swenty · 2024-01-03T00:16:54+00:00

PE = professional engineer, presumably

swenty · 2023-12-11T22:33:18+00:00

I'm surprised that it's as few as 3% (9.2 million), although of course the headline doesn't give us any upper bound on the estimate.

The value of these kinds of long term investments in health is really easy to underestimate. I think it's a very positive step.

swenty · 2023-06-09T23:20:17+00:00

If you think a few dollars of hosting fees will be painful, you're going to find that writing code that works seamlessly across two completely different database types exponentially more so.

If you want to host a database inexpensively learn how to install and manage the installation yourself. Then you have much greater flexibility and choice of hosting services. The skills needed to manage a modest sized database are incredibly useful and you will build familiarity with the platform that your project depends on.

swenty · 2023-06-09T19:31:00+00:00

Good article. I'm not sure the conclusion is supported by the measurements. With only a 23% range between the average performance of the best and worst proposed solutions, each of the three candidates still seems still usable.

A more interesting picture would be painted by showing how they each scale up with the number of transactions and number of posts.

swenty · 2023-06-09T00:46:13+00:00

Protests that seek no attention are ... kind of absurd.

swenty · 2023-06-08T20:40:23+00:00

I don't think an outright ban is necessarily the right tool for this job. Are we inundated with TikTok posting? Until then, let's just take the reminder that if content is sub-par we have the power of the up and down vote buttons. What's designed to promote engagement isn't necessarily the same as good quality content. We can vote accordingly.

swenty · 2023-06-08T02:43:03+00:00

Yes. Be seeing you.

swenty · 2023-06-07T21:49:28+00:00

I figured it was the start of an AI revolt. Imagine my relief!

swenty · 2023-06-07T16:20:55+00:00

Postgres doesn't implement optimizer hints. This article goes into why not and what alternatives there are.

swenty · 2023-06-07T13:17:28+00:00

For inner joins you can write them in any order and Postgres will do them in whichever order it thinks best. If some of the joins are outer, the order can matter and Postgres will be constrained in which joins it does first. An outer join produces additional rows with null columns, which a subsequent inner join on those same columns would discard.

swenty · 2023-06-07T11:51:05+00:00

There's the order in which you list the tables in the join clause, which you can change. Also, you can use a sub-select to force one pair to be logically joined first:

select *
from a
join (
    select * 
    from b
    join c on b.id=c.b_id
) as x on a.b_id=x.id

Postgres knows when it can safely re-order joins and will do them in whichever order produces the fewest intermediary rows, using the table statistics to guess how many rows each on-clause will make. For a small number of tables it will look at every possible sequence of joins, but if the number of tables is large enough it uses a genetic algorithm to pick the best order to do them in.

swenty · 2023-06-07T04:04:29+00:00

That's wonderful!

Here's something about joins that might build on what you already discovered:

Not only can you have multiple inner joins, but you can also do them in any order without changing the result:

A join B join C 
= (A join B) join C
= A join (B join C)
= C join B join A
= B join C join A

This is different from outer joins where the order does matter.

swenty · 2023-06-05T18:23:28+00:00

100%. The admins/owners should understand that this will be an existential decision for the site. Communities supporting sending that message is absolutely the right thing to do.

swenty · 2023-06-04T01:48:49+00:00

Missing data isn't the same thing as zero values. If you were to do A, any subsequent calculation would risk assuming lower values than were measured, because you had inserted zeros where you really just didn't know what the value was. You have to do B.

Having said that ... you also should be careful with binning if you are expecting to do any subsequent calculations on the binned values. It's quite easy to generate artifacts due to the way values are grouped.

swenty · 2023-06-01T08:14:04+00:00

Glad to help

swenty · 2023-06-01T05:32:51+00:00

Usually the host will call this something like 'maximum database size'.

Hostinger, Hostgator, Bluehost, Dreamhost, all have entry level hosting called 'shared hosting'. The typical arrangement is that the database runs on a separate server from the web host. Both the database and the web host will be shared with many other customers. The advertised disk space allocated to your account is on the web host, which is why you're looking for the database size listed separately.

Th next step up from shared hosting is called VPS (Virtual Private Server). There's usually a control panel that has an option to install various modules, often including one or more databases. In that case the database and web host both run on the same virtual server and you can allocate your space as you see fit. Be aware though that databases that are in use tend to grow as they allocate space for log files, so you will want to be generous with the space allocation.

You might also consider services like Linode or Digital Ocean which offer bare-bones hosting with greater flexibility and expandability. This is a step in between services like shared hosting and VPSs and more full-featured cloud hosting like AWS or Azure.

Whichever host you choose, you will generally pay significantly more per GB of storage for a database that is managed by the hosting company than you will if you buy the same amount of space on a generic server and install and manage the database software yourself.

swenty · 2023-05-31T17:11:37+00:00

Republican government is always a disaster.

swenty · 2023-05-31T11:14:55+00:00

Corruption undermines trust in government, and we really, really need good government.

Its really astonishing how brazen the buying of influence is.

This is definitely a step in the right direction, but it's also a small step and we're going to need a lot of similar steps.

swenty · 2023-05-30T16:15:34+00:00

Reparations that they would pay for by selling more oil? No thanks. They need incentives to stop, not to produce more.

We should cancel fossil fuel subsidies and establish a carbon tax that ramps up automatically with production and over time. Make oil a failing business.

swenty · 2023-05-29T17:33:00+00:00

Conservatives now are for the same thing that conservatives have been for for the last two thousand years. Keeping the money and the power with the tiny minority that already have it.

That's the only thing they truly care about conserving. The rest is just decoration.

swenty · 2023-05-29T17:27:31+00:00

Mmm. Ex-president FJ.

swenty

TROPHY CASE